Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-bsi-why-we-sleep-matt-walker-20171003-story.html

by dalfonso • 9 years ago

417 294 9 years ago

harryf4• 9 years ago

By use of meditation and yoga I've found the opposite to be true. The system I've used is described somewhat here http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/lifestyle/health-fitness/10-he...

Edit: downvotes why?

Mefis• 9 years ago

I didn't down vote you,but just skimming through your article, #9 seems false.

Blood is not affected by magnetic fields, it seems to me. https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-blood-attracted-to-a-magnet-s...

harryf4• 9 years ago

I can't attest for that point scientifically or even personally.

The argument in #9 as I understand it is, over the course of your lifetime, the cumulative minuscule effect of how you sleep relative to the Earths magnetic field can have a negative effect on your health, increasing the risk of stroke or brain related conditions.

To prove or disprove would require long term study (in the order of a human lifetime) with equipment capable of detecting very small changes while eliminating all other effects.

n4r9• 9 years ago

I wouldn't downvote you (even if I could) for adding to the discussion, but this certainly isn't the sort of content I come to HN to explore. Outlandish claims without anything to back them up.

harryf4• 9 years ago

Fair enough. Can only back up with personal experience at this point. "It works for me"

barry-cotter4• 9 years ago

I didn’t downvote you but claiming meditation and yoga substitutes for sleep pattern matches to quack/idiot. Your link has the word guru in it which points the same way. Personally I find it credible because I’ve read studies before suggesting meditation can substitute for sleep 1 for 1 up to some threshold but I’m too lazy to search for them. If you make claims that are as credible as a homeopath or anti-vaxxer cite something that at least looks credible.

harryf4• 9 years ago

Fair enough. Was in a hurry. Was obviously a topic that needs more detail. Have also seen those studies (via HN) - in fact they were what originally got me curious about meditation about 5 years ago.

Meanwhile the guru in question is one that gets invited to Talk at Google, if that's any measure of credibility - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQn8X4FbpTM

pascalxus2• 9 years ago

the article states 7 hours is the minimum, but I seem to need a lot more. they state, if you can sleep after the alarm clock goes off, then you should sleep more.

So, what if you get 8.5 hours of sleep but you still could sleep, after the alarm clock goes off? there should be some upper limit, maybe 9?

mikebridgman• 9 years ago

The article states 7 to 9 hours.

ForRealsies• 9 years ago

I recommend a 'Sleep' app on your phone. I set it to 7am and it'll wake me up anywhere from 6:30-7, depending on my sleep cycle. Never felt drowsy on 6:30 days.

givinguflac• 9 years ago

This works well for me (I use ‘sleep cycle’) but doesn’t solve my inability to actually get tired and go to bed at night.

exhilaration• 9 years ago

How does an app predict your sleep cycle? Do you have the keep phone on you?

joering2• 9 years ago

Unless there is extend of stress or body injury that needs sleep to continue the recovering process, or other medical situation occurs, a healthy body does NOT require more sleep than 6-7 hours, because it is not about sleep's length but the quality of REM sessions of your sleep. If you happen to to push your sleep over 8.5 hour, you are entering into another REM session (that you don't need) that's why when you wake up in the middle of from it, you feel very tired. But try to wake up precise 6.5 hour after you fell asleep and you will feel very refreshed (given you had interrupted good night sleep)

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

I don't you can generalize things like this. I am sure there are people who can get by on 6 hours or less naturally. But the problem starts when people who need more try force themselves to sleep less. I have done a lot experimentation with this and had to accept that the only sustainable way for me is to sleep around 8 hours every night. It would be cool if I could make do with 4 but it's just not in me.

frozenport• 9 years ago

The point is that people who claim to function on six are unable to correctly judge their capabilities and are most likely wrong about that claim.

LogicX• 9 years ago

Anecdote is not data, but I have not set an alarm for many years - I sleep 5-6 hours (only 5 since I went vegan) and I wake up on my own, refreshed. Occasionally I’m tired, I take a nap. I don’t do coffee, I have unsweetened tea but don’t go nuts on caffeine, social drinking.

I don’t feel any need to ‘sleep in’ on weekends.

Yes, I work from home and own my own company, so I have the luxury of taking a nap in the middle of the day.

If I were to try to force myself to sleep 8 or 9 hours I feel worse; so I don’t do that anymore.

andrei_says_• 9 years ago

For me, too, this has been a huge step in improving my quality of life.

Danihan4• 9 years ago

I'm extremely productive on 4.5 hours, but using a biphasic sleep pattern. 3 hours at night, 1.5 hours in a daytime nap.

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

How long have you been sleeping like that?

Danihan4• 9 years ago

About 1.5 years, give or take.

I pretty much require 9 hours on a monophasic schedule to feel as sharp.

imustbeevil2• 9 years ago

the Foundation suggests anywhere from six hours to 11 hours of sleep per night for individuals between the ages of 18 and 25 may be suitable, or six hours to 10 hours for those between the ages of 26 and 64.

A four to five hour deviation is quite significant. That's a difference of 80% between the most amount of sleep needed and the least.

"I suppose the rule of thumb in adults is about seven to eight hours, but is that based on any really solid science? I would sort of say not," said Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience and head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vv7eqx/why-do-dif...

SebNag_• 9 years ago

Scientific sources?

Prescribing one amount of sleep for every kind of person seems very obviously wrong.

That's, AFAIK, not.

peterwwillis• 9 years ago

Sleep need is variable, work is variable, motivation is variable. It's more likely that sleep is a spectrum, hence the 8.34% variance in required minimum sleep for adults, or how general quality of health affects ability to maintain sleep. It's even possible that sleep has nothing to do with our health and productivity other than being an indicator of it, and not necessarily a cause for it. Thanks, pseudo-scientific studies.

ryanbrunner• 9 years ago

This is all true, but I think it's worthwhile to be very skeptical about your assumption of how much sleep is healthy for you. Everyone in these threads assumes that they are one of the special few who does perfectly fine on 5 hours of sleep.

_qbjt• 9 years ago

This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleeping habits. I'd love to get 7-9 hours of sleep, but I just don't have the time.

lutorm• 9 years ago

Actually, studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do. It's just recent history that's an anomaly...

ksk3• 9 years ago

Why is it important that studies have shown a particular result?

wmil• 9 years ago

Not only that, but the 40h/week ignores commutes. For some people that's an additional 15h/week.

Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize.

ztjio• 9 years ago

Studies on same people suggest 6-6.5 hours of sleep per day was the norm, though. It questions the recent claims that adults "need" more.

jhgjklj• 9 years ago

As the technology advances we should be working less but its the opposite. Here's an essay by Bertrand Russel http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

wolfram74• 9 years ago

I think the people GP was referring to were early industrial age folks before labor unions pushed for humane working conditions.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 9 years ago

What studies? This is the internet, use that fancy hypertext.

I'm not very familiar with this particular area, but I do know from books like The Better Angles Of Our Nature (and criticisms thereof) that this is a contentious statement. There are many myths about ancient humans, some that overly indulge in 'savagery' and others that are too idyllic.

The evidence for either interpretation is fairly fraught and I'm deeply skeptical of any affirmative claims one way or another.

GhostVII• 9 years ago

Hunter gatherer societies also weren't paying for cell phones, and internet, and mortgages/rent. I'm sure you could get by working part time for 15 hours a week if you gave up all of your modern conveniences and lived outdoors in a tent, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable.

taneq• 9 years ago

Yeah, their leisure time sucked pretty badly though. And they lived a precarious existence with none of the nice things we take for granted. I wouldn't swap.

kamaal• 9 years ago

>hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working"

Looking at it purely in terms for food and survival requires very little energy to get by life. But that comes with its own problems. Actually Hellenistic period in many ways was a far better time to live in than now.

ashark2• 9 years ago

Four sixes or three eights feels like about the right balance, to me. It'd be the point at which a working professional could plausibly and in a non-trying-to-make-a-point way respond with something other than their job to the question, "so, what do you do?" It also might be just enough time off to let a working couple also homeschool their kids (they'd still need a daycare or some kind of parent-free activity or something some of the time, though) without running themselves entirely ragged.

Xeoncross2• 9 years ago

people used to work 100 hour weeks

Many people still work +100 hour weeks - just not all for their primary paying jobs. Raising children, side projects, home repair, etc..

freehunter3• 9 years ago

Well if we're defining it like that, literally everything is a job so people work 24/7.

ako• 9 years ago

Wait till you have kids, then you realize how much time you had to just have a life...

eduren• 9 years ago

So then why would I have kids?

onychomys2• 9 years ago

No kidding. Mine are 4 and 1.5, and my hobbies now include watching Paw Patrol, being the starting gun for pee races, and picking up toys in rooms that were clean an hour before. I think back on the days where I could play video games or practice the guitar with such fondness.

CalRobert3• 9 years ago

Kid is 7 weeks old and have literally just found 40 minutes to work on a side project for the first time in a week.

mlcrypto• 9 years ago

Do something about it bro. If you want something you gotta take it. Nobody is gonna come offering you a dream work week. But the catch 22 is you gotta lose some sleep to find time to develop some systems to make passive income

gph2• 9 years ago

That might work for the OP or someone who is capable of earning enough to set up systems to make a passive income.

But that's not a global solution to the problem. We can't all be lazy rent seeking drains on society.

mxuribe• 9 years ago

I'm with you all the way!

I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.

Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?

Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)

nradov• 9 years ago

Increased automation allows for more leisure time for those who own the robots.

foobarian• 9 years ago

In my case, it's the exercise :-)

Delmania3• 9 years ago

Automation never results in more leisure. It results in more specialized work and increased workloads. The sentiment expressed in the first line is why I intend to stay working remotely for as long as possible. I hated the fact I saw a drab grey cubicle farm more than my house and family.

nroach• 9 years ago

Bear in mind that we segment our activity more in "modern" society. For example, in agrarian societies you didn't need to carve out time for exercise. Work was exercise. You also didn't need to carve out time for child care, because children worked alongside adults much of the time. And commuting wasn't really an issue when workplaces and residences were in the same community with minimal geographic separation.

It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.

photonios2• 9 years ago

I also used to feel this way. What worked for me is to not to do some of these things. For example, I got a robot vacuum cleaner and a robot mop. For any additional cleaning, I have a cleaning lady that comes every once in a while. This saves me a couple of hours of cleaning each month. If the car breaks, or something needs to be done around the house, I hire someone to do it. Groceries are delivered according to a schedule. Saves me a couple of hours of running around the supermakt.

I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.

As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.

ChemicalWarfare• 9 years ago

for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.

eric_h• 9 years ago

I was having a conversation with my boss at lunch today - and he made a joke how the difference between our respective sleep/activity schedules is basically the same as the difference between our schedules on the east coast of the USA and our team overseas (he's a morning person, I'm not and have never been).

I told him I'd never again work at a job that required me to be there at 9am, because I'm effectively useless before 11am, completely independent of how much sleep I've had the night before. The only plus side, I joked, was that even though I'd only gotten 4-6 productive hours of work done, no one batted an eye when I left at 5pm, since I'd been there since 9.

TheGrassyKnoll• 9 years ago

I used to be kind of the 'leader' in flex hours where I worked, and I worked a lot (too much I think).

  Then I got layed off.

  Remember, its not how many hours you work, its how many hours you work when the boss is there.

arvinsim2• 9 years ago

I more of a 6-3 kind of person. But that just strengthens the argument that one size does not fit all.

schmidty• 9 years ago

commute - work someplace closer. or get remote work.

chores - have less stuff to maintain.

eating - not sure what can be done here.

exercise - look into tabata or hiit. you can workout 2x20min a week.

you can also find way to be more efficient with your activities to cut off time on each one, even if you keep it.

sure none of these suggestions is without cost. but these suggestions can be enacted to the end goal of more time (for sleep or whatever)

miranda_rights• 9 years ago

eating - I think that's why Soylent was so popular. People liked the idea of drinking a meal while working/multi-tasking. I'm not 100% into it, especially since I'd prefer something with a better ratio of protein, but I see the appeal.

jdavis7032• 9 years ago

* You can collapse your commute and exercise in to one activity.

* You either pre-cook meals on the weekend, or utilize a meal substitute like Soylent (or both)

* Most chores involve cleaning things that just get dirty as part of their normal use, if you shower and spend most of your "toilet time" at work, you automatically have someone who's going to clean up after you.

dvfjsdhgfv• 9 years ago

You nailed it! Everybody expects something from us - our partners, bosses, children... We also have needs and expectations - we need to exercise etc. How should we find time for all this working eight hours a day (realistically - at least 10 hours as most people are commuting. You wake up, go to work, get back, try to do your best at whatever you need to do... No wonder people sacrifice their sleep.

coldtea2• 9 years ago

I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks)

People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.

Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.

And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".

Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.

naravara• 9 years ago

Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.

You can kind of see this transition happening if you visit currently-industrializing countries like India or China.

sp527• 9 years ago

You’re not imagining it. With 8 hours of sleep and a 9 hour work day plus all the other things that are effectively ‘required’, we are left with about 4 free hrs per weekday in a very optimistic scenario (commute is 30 minutes each way, you’re really fast with your bathroom routine, you down breakfast super quick, dinner and lunch are 30 mins each, etc).

The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.

In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.

What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.

And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.

leekyle333• 9 years ago

I think the most annoying part of the 8 hour work day is that a vast majority of people aren't actually working close to 8 hours. There's a lot of talking and looking at mindless stuff. My friend worked for IBM in the finance department and he streamed every world cup game. Got a promotion too.

vacri• 9 years ago

Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life.

It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.

sbarg• 9 years ago

Totally on board with this. I'm currently looking for a 1/2 time contract gig, mostly because that's about all I want to work in conjunction with running a household and raising two kids.

megy• 9 years ago

Also why I think people who do long commutes are missing out majorly.

scandinavegan• 9 years ago

(commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.)

I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.

If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.

It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

Many advanced nations outside the United States (talking mainly about Europe) have learned long ago that the eight hour workday is too much. But in many places in the United States, an eight hour workday would be considered quite short. The other issue is annual vacation time; it's surprisingly short on average in United States compared to most other places.

uoaei• 9 years ago

it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life

Sleep is a vital part of life. You are not missing out on life if you sleep--you are living.

xtrimsky1234• 9 years ago

Working remotely has helped me a lot (cutting commuting). I work 8 hours, eat, exercise and get 8 hours of sleep. My wife who isn't working does more chores than I do (although I help a lot during the weekend). My only complain is that outside of exercising I have very little freetime, but that's mainly because I spend lots of time with my kids.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

I feel like when I get 8-9 I am much more productive and have a much better mood. Seven for me is sort of the point where I can go throughout the day but I will be distracted. Six or less is really bad for me.

I really notice when I get less sleep I make a bunch more comments on HN / reddit or use Twitter much more.

passivepinetree• 9 years ago

Likely because you're less focused/more susceptible to the quick reward and novelty that these sites provide.

I've noticed when I sleep better I can better focus on long-form entertainment (reading a novel vs. browsing HN, for example).

rightos4• 9 years ago

But do I need to be more productive?

It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.

It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.

oliveshell2• 9 years ago

Because you’re doing long-term damage to your brain?

Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.

rightos4• 9 years ago

Most of these studies tend to be focused on temporary effects, including this one. Most of that "damage" can be undone with a good nights sleep.

But even if some amount is permanent, so what? Does my brain need to be in mint condition? If the cost of getting more enjoyment out of life is a little brain damage, so be it. I hold no ego about my brain being perfect. Performance is only one aspect of life and not one I strive to prioritize significantly over enjoyment.

jules• 9 years ago

If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay. You might also be shortening your life by not sleeping enough, perhaps by a larger amount than you're gaining by sleeping less. That is clearly the case in the limit of not sleeping at all -- you would shorten your life to a month at best, not to mention that the quality of life would go down.

rightos4• 9 years ago

If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay.

That's making the huge assumption that you're willing to constantly seek your maximum pay and that you get paid solely for your measurable productivity output, which is in my experience very rarely the case. More often than not you get paid based on capabilities and responsibilities, not significantly more or less on your output. It's certainly not a direct X% less productive = X% less pay relationship. I believe it's been shown that seeking new employers is the best way to maximize pay, but that means interviews are often the difference between you and more pay, yet no one can judge future productivity in an interview.

you would shorten your life to a month at best

To my knowledge, sleep dep hasn't actually killed people directly like this, they simply start sleeping.

watwut2• 9 years ago

"If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work"

That is not how it works practically. Less productive people don't get less salaries, unless their productivity is going really really down. Most companies use hours spend at work as proxy for productivity for salary purposes. Oftentimes you may look like super productive cause you are fixing a lot of bugs or constantly runing meetings. That bug were cause by you or those meetings could be half shorter is something superiors rarely see.

It is just hard to measure exact productivity.

ng12• 9 years ago

It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it?

That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.

itamarst2• 9 years ago

You're approaching productivity from the wrong angle. It's not about producing more, and especially not producing more while tired... it's about doing less unnecessary work. This requires thought, and is easier with a full night's sleep.

https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro...

rightos4• 9 years ago

However you define productivity, I still work the same number of hours in a given day, so whether it's more output or better output, it's still all the same to me. There's no reason for me to invest the extra hours in sleep to improve it when I can invest that time in things I enjoy. I don't see how that changes anything I said. My work is defined by hours, not goals, not lines of code, but hours.

epc4• 9 years ago

If you feel groggy in the morning or just not well–rested even after 7-8 hours sleep, get your sinuses & lungs checked.

Could be sleep apnea, but in my case I felt congested all the time. What I thought was allergies was actually the linings of my sinuses inflamed to the point of closing off air passages.

Unclear if the root cause in my case was acid-reflux into the sinus cavities or exposure to dust from ground zero.

The resulting surgery kind of sucked (free tip: don't have your sinuses roto-rootered in the winter) but ever since I've been able to sleep a solid 6-7 hours every night. I now wake up rested, don't feel groggy, typically without an alarm.

nikkwong• 9 years ago

I was just diagnosed with sleep apnea this week after it wreaked havoc on my personal and professional life for the last 6. I couldn't work, couldn't engage in anything. Now I'm pretty much terrified to go to sleep every night as I know I'm probably not going to get any rest and wake up zombified. I heard the surgery was a hit or miss. Would you recommend?

rhcom22• 9 years ago

CPAP is usually the first line for sleep apnea. I've been using one for the past couple of months. They've improved the masks so the really only annoyance is being tethered to the machine when you roll over but it isn't too bad.

Another thing I've learned is the CPAP machines now phone home to the insurance company to give them compliance data on how and when you use the machine. Less happy about that.

nrclark• 9 years ago

No opinion on the surgery, but you might try a CPAP machine! I have a family member whose epiglottis was damaged in surgery, and she developed really bad sleep apnea as a result.

It took her a solid year of being a zombie before she figured out what was happening and why. She bought a CPAP, and it's made a huge difference in her quality of life.

So if you're looking to try out a non-surgical fix while you ponder a surgery, consider buying/renting/borrowing a CPAP!

hugozap• 9 years ago

I was also diagnosed with it last week. I'll be buying a CPAP as the night I tested it improved my sleep quality. I've also removed my pillow and that has helped.

lojack2• 9 years ago

Absolutely 100% get the CPAP machine and give it a few months. I didn't immediately feel better after using the machine, but I'm about one year in at this point and it was life changing for me.

0xJRS• 9 years ago

I know someone who slept like that for over 10 years before I convinced them to get the mask and now they thank me and cant sleep without it

komali23• 9 years ago

I had so much shit that just sucked in my life the first 21 years of it. I always had sinus infections, I would constantly have what my friends and I call "poo-brain," where you just have slug thoughts and can't get your shit in order and your speech might even slur. Depression. Etc.

Then I started taking fexofenadine (allegra) and fluticasone (nasonex) every day. After 2 weeks, nearly every problem I had vanished. No more sinus infections, I could breathe and smell, I slept incredibly, no more poo brain, no more 2pm "head of concrete." It was like I started a new life.

Anyway if you have any of the above try that drug routine maybe? You gotta keep it up non stop for 2 weeks straight to see results, and the potential downside is that now if I get off my antihistamines for like a day even, I'm likely to instantly get a sinus infection.

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

I used to do Allegra. But I started getting an irregular heartbeat. (It's called a premature ventricular contraction - basically, the nerves tell the ventricle to contract too soon after the previous heartbeat, and the muscle says "I just did that, I'm on my coffee break now", and the heartbeat gets skipped. The next heartbeat happens reliably, though, so it's not at all dangerous. But more blood has shown up at the heart, so the next heartbeat kind of hurts - kind of like when you swallow something a bit too big for your throat.)

Anyway, that all went away when I quit Allegra. Now I just use the fluticasone. But I had to get allergy shots for a while, because in my case, the problem was the cat that slept on my bed.

epc4• 9 years ago

That worked for me for awhile (mix of actifed + loratadine/claritin) but eventually the inflammation got so bad that no medication worked.

gbrain2• 9 years ago

I actually had the same issue for the first 21 years of my life as well. Doctors gave me all of those those things, fluticasone, zyrtec, etc.

I cut gluten out of my life, and basically everything changed. I no longer get 10 sinus infections a year, I don't have to take any allergy medicines, my depression went away, and I can sleep less.

All of my doctors told me to take drugs to solve it, but it turns out I am gluten intolerant, and cutting it out has changed my life forever.

ikeyany• 9 years ago

Might I ask what kind of climate you live in? I am assuming it's not an arid one.

lojack2• 9 years ago

I used to sleep until noon on the weekends and could easily spend 10+ hours sleeping a night if I let myself. After a year of my wife kicking me out of bed because of snoring too loud, I finally went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a severe apnea. I'm average weight, never had a problem waking up, and didn't feel that tired throughout the day like a lot of sufferers feel. Using the CPAP machine wasn't a life altering experience that immediately changed how I felt.

Fast forward 6 months or so... I have serious difficulty sleeping more than 8 hours, can hardly sleep past when the sun comes up. Don't need an alarm to wake up, and feel well rested after 7 hours of sleep. I'm also so much more productive at work, actually feel awake and can focus on things. Prior to the CPAP machine I don't think I ever actually understood what it was like to not feel tired, it was just my normal state so I was actually tired without even realizing it. It was a life altering change that didn't happen overnight. I've tried a couple times to sleep without the CPAP machine, and it just doesn't happen. I imagine its the same as sleeping before, I just notice how I'm unable to sleep now.

This might not be true for everyone, but if you're told you snore really bad, and don't feel exhausted all the time, but can sleep constantly... you may have sleep apnea and are just dealing with the symptoms without even realizing. It was absolutely worth getting checked out for me.

nozzlegear• 9 years ago

I had almost the same experience, except I was moderate sleep apnea rather than severe. I remember being disappointed after the first night with my CPAP because I didn't have the "holy cow, I slept so good and I feel amazing and refreshed now" experience that a lot of other CPAP users were reporting.

Luckily I stuck with it, and after a few months I had to sleep without the machine for about a week and noticed a massive difference - I felt like hot garbage. The whole week without it I was so tired, had headaches every day, constant brain fog, and it was just hard to sleep in general. Now I'm a big believer in the CPAP machine and happily wear it every night.

Bonus: my wife no longer wakes me up every night for snoring ;)

epc4• 9 years ago

Just a follow up…I got tested for sleep apnea because I fit the profile (overweight, snorer) but they found no evidence that I stopped breathing at all overnight. The sinus thing didn't get diagnosed until one of my frontal sinuses closed off during descent into JFK. Can't begin to explain the pain other than feeling like your head is exploding.

zten• 9 years ago

I've always suspected I have a problem like this but couldn't ever get a doctor to help.

Prior to treatment, did your sinuses open up completely during hard aerobic exercise and then feel like they slam shut as soon as you were done?

epc4• 9 years ago

No. The only thing that helped a bit was the saline spray the ENTs use, which I suspect had some mild steroids. That would help sinuses open for a few hours.

The symptoms, in retrospect, were the constant feeling of a stuffy noise and headaches during air pressure changes like sudden altitude changes while flying (gradual ascent/descent didn’t bother me most of the time).

My doctor initially declared I had sleep apnea, only after that test did he refer me to an ENT who diagnosed it in a few minutes with some sort of scope they stick up your nasal passages.

moosey• 9 years ago

I'm interested as well. Despite the fact that I take similar allergy medications, I find that as soon as my head hits the pillow my nasal passages close. It's really frustrating.

ams6110• 9 years ago

I feel like my natural body clock is a 28-hour day. If I have no reason to get up I'll sleep for about 10 hours, but then I'm not ready to sleep again for about 18 hours.

I'm guessing the 10 hours is just making up for sleep debt and that might taper off if I could sleep as much as I wanted every night. But the realities of life (kids in school, work, kid's activities, etc.) mean that I have to be awake by about 6:45am and being in bed and asleep before 10:00 just doesn't happen very often either.

and0• 9 years ago

I'm the same way. Back when I used to have summer breaks (highschool / college if I didn't have a part-time gig) my days would start 2 hours later every day. So I'd wake up at 8, then 10, then 12... until I was fully nocturnal. But then 4-5 days later I was back to waking up in the morning.

ashark2• 9 years ago

I used to think that about myself. Now I'm pretty sure it's just the result of having light pollution (lights outside candle temperature and brighter than three or four candles) including glowing screens, electronic device hyperstimulation, and the Internet info treadmill, after 9:00 or so. If I give myself a good long stretch of low light and no electronic toys my "28-hour clock" not-so-mysteriously turns into an ordinary 24-hour one. Being outdoors and active as much as possible during daylight hours also helps (especially in Summer, when dark hours are in short supply).

randcraw3• 9 years ago

My natural day lasts considerably more than 24 hours, but only when TV/video is active. Without them, I'm ready for bed by 10 PM. If I still had any working grey cells, I'd run some week-long A/B experiments to verify and assess the impact of each. But I don't think I could live with all that silence, so...

k__2• 9 years ago

I stopped setting an alarm 90% of my nights and ended up with 10h sleep (2-12) till I wake up by myself.

tryingagainbro• 9 years ago

Why not sleep 8 hours a day if needed (Personally, I'm even more useless on less than 7-8 hrs of sleep)?

I am sure you can reinvent the wheel and then some in what's left. People are productive when they are productive, you can come up with the idea to change the world in 60 mins...or never in your lifetime.

If Einstein had lived to 150 it's not a given that his contribution to the would would have 2X...

justherefortart• 9 years ago

I've slept roughly 9 hours every night my entire life. I can't imagine giving up good sleep for anything. Hell, going to bed is usually my favorite thing to do outside of hobbies.

imustbeevil2• 9 years ago

I'm much more interested in why a body needs an amount of sleep, what processes it is conducting, and how you can affect those processes.

What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Can you tell the difference between a 6th hour brain and a 7th hour brain? Does anything you eat or do during a day affect how long this process takes? What about hydration / nutrition?

I'm sure these are all answerable, but I'm not sure most people know the answers, and this article certainly doesn't get us any closer to understanding.

cavanasm• 9 years ago

This article isn't exactly a presentation of research. Several of those answerable questions will probably be worth Nobel Prizes for the people who can answer them. This is fundamentally a puff piece with a sleep expert promoting his new general audience book on sleep health (Not discounting the tips, or his expertise, but this is obviously not a research paper). Several of the sleep hygiene tips he gives are things that aren't really settled AFAIK in the field, possibly why he even specifically mentions "practicing what he preaches" in that last question. He's preaching at least as much as talking about settled science.

komali23• 9 years ago

This article doesn't try to, but this comment section would be a fine place for those smarter than me to drop knowledge bombs on us :D

....

...

pizza• 9 years ago

Pure speculation, but suppose that sleep were a cleaning process such that d(Neuron Waste Removed)/dT was a logistic curve.

njarboe3• 9 years ago

The genetic variability of humans seems large enough that simple rules about sleep, like nutrition, are probably wrong for many people. Get more sleep if you are tired all the time? Maybe that would work.

mbertschler• 9 years ago

Does someone have some scientific source on that topic? I couldn't find something linked in the article.

dreamdu5t• 9 years ago

Not a single study or piece of research referenced by the article. "Some professor with a book says..." is not very convincing.

This is not a news article, and is not journalism. This is an advertisement for a book.

a_lieb• 9 years ago

One important thing the article doesn't cover: we now have good reason to suspect that chronic sleep deprivation can cause brain damage. Not just a long term decrease in function, but actual cellular damage.

In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])

As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24429-sleep-boosts-br...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system

wtetzner• 9 years ago

I'm productive on six hours of sleep in the sense that I get something done. However, I am quite noticeably less productive than if I get more sleep.

Even if I don't feel tired, I notice that my thoughts are more muddled and it's hard to concentrate. If I get 6 hours or less of sleep one night, it's usually not a problem. But if the lack of sleep is over multiple days (like it usually is), then it becomes much worse.

jason_slack• 9 years ago

This makes me feel weird knowing that I practice a polyphasic sleep pattern for such a long time now.

bsenftner• 9 years ago

What is it about those that need less? I personally have been sleeping 5-6 hours per night for decades. In my mid-30's I stopped my youthful partying and found I did not need to sleep as much. Now, at 52, more than 6 hours feel like too much and I'm groggy.

bmelton• 9 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you. You might Google for DEC2, and maybe there's even a test for it. I'm convinced I have it, and even did a 23andMe thinking they might test for it, but alas, they don't.

Despite knowing that I just don't need a lot in the way of sleep, it seems that every time I make that claim, it's met with incredulity, but having worked a job for 6 years in a different time zone, and with a loose schedule, whenever I just went to bed when I got tired, and woke up when I woke up, I found that the median sleep length was in the 5-5.5 hour range.

evanwise• 9 years ago

Same. 5 to 6 hours and I feel fine, unless I'm ill or already sleep deprived. I can function on 3-4 hours per night for extended periods of time before I start to notice serious deterioration in mental faculties. I believe it's genetic. Some studies have tentatively tied naturally short sleep cycles to a gene variant (http://www.sleepeducation.org/sleep-disorders-by-category/in...). Also, my father sleeps for about the same amount of time as well.

chiefalchemist• 9 years ago

I think the headline is misleading. Let's say I stay up late to do X, Y and/or Z. These things to mean have meaning. In doing them I feel a sense of accomplishment. I've been productive.

Now I show up to work the next day. Certainly less sleep has some effect on me. But that doesn't devalue the increased productivity from the previous evening.

The brain is a limited resource. There might be occasional short term hacks/cheats. But on average you'll have X gallons in the mental tank. This is true. If you spend that at home then yes you will be "less productive" at work.

conistonwater• 9 years ago

There is a very good talk on youtube by William Dement from Stanford that is longer-form than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8

sandworm101• 9 years ago

> If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clearly more sleep that is needed.

Totally wrong. I just finished 4 months of military training. Sleep deprivation was part of the training. We were constantly sleep deprived. It impacted our performance, that was the point. That said, I'm one of those people who always seems to get up 2 minutes before the alarm. Even in my sleep-deprived state, less than four hours a night for weeks, I still woke up before my alarm.

Rasco• 9 years ago

Your point, although interesting, does not invalidate the quote. Let A be « you would sleep past the alarm clock without it » and B « you are sleep-deprived » They say A → B. You say false since I got B and not(A). A → B does not imply B → A which would be proved false by your case.

refurb• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm weird, but I've never deluded myself about the impact of a lack of sleep. My entire life I've strived to get 7.5 to 8 hours a night. I'm not that successful lately, but I make it a priority.

What I don't get are people that brag about not getting much sleep. It's clearly unhealthy. Would you brag about your poor eating habits? Or not following a medication regimen?

I know the science is still early, but I have no doubt that poor sleep has a significant, long-term, permanent impact on health.

swah• 9 years ago

Sometimes I can sleep over 6 hours, but then I wake up with back pain...

undersuit• 9 years ago

Sleep on your back on the floor, beds are an new invention and a bad one can be painful. So before you go out and buy a new mattress experiment with your sleep. Hammocks are also said to be a good alternative.

ohdrat• 9 years ago

Have gotten 6 for decades, but I used to swim/run/yoga. Now I don't do anything because there's no time and am still productive, but need lots of caffeine and morale boosters, like I traded a couple pairs loafer mesh shoes I didn't like for a high end pair of proper fitting ASIC running shoes at Nordstrom's today. In fact I lost a couple hours sleep just thinking about trading those shoes today...

lanius• 9 years ago

And yet South Korean students get less than 6 hours of sleep a night. Insane how society just accepts that.

martin1975• 9 years ago

multiple shrinks, doctors, psychiatrists, sleep therapists have told me a 7 hour minimum is required... I'm in my 40's.

sabujp• 9 years ago

so basically having kids makes you stupid, more prone to heart attack, etc etc

ramirez602• 9 years ago

I can't be alone in being exhausted at these studies. Doctors and Lawyers have spent the better part of the last century working on little to no sleep. Academics too. As an engineer, I would regularly work through little sleep because the process of loading a large project into my head to work on it would take more time than the gains from being more well rested. I'm older now, and no longer work as an engineer. I value my sleep and appreciate how much more I can task-switch on a good nights rest, but the idea that I'm not being productive when I'm grinding through work that has to get done and I'm tired seems an overwritten idea.

I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.

The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.

Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this

wpietri2• 9 years ago

Your definition of "works" is suspicious to me.

If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.

You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.

Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.

[1] http://www.bcmj.org/article/sleep-deprivation-among-physicia...

ramirez602• 9 years ago

I don't mean to claim doctors do fine without enough sleep. Doctor friends I have spoken to talk about this talk about the reforms but it is not uniformly positive. I am trying to posit that the claim that we function better with more sleep is true. But that claim is made in a vacuum. Person A operates at 100% well rested. But operating at 80% or 60% is more valuable than 0% if averaged out over time. So I can write better code when I'm well rested, sure. I agree with that. I think everyone logically will. If I have 1000 lines of code to write. And it will take me 10 hours to write it. And I have 2 days to do it. I'll spread it out over 2 days and write good code, and maybe it only end up taking 800 lines of code. But if I have 1 day to write it. I might end up writing 1200 lines of code, but still get it done in that day, it is more valuable to me, than a day later when the code doesn't matter anymore. I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.

Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?

ssijak• 9 years ago

Are there any reliable devices that can measure rem phases during sleep reliably and wake you up after 6-8 hours when the rem phase ends? And I'm not talking about sleep apps for phones which work with mics and accelerometers.

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

Fuck sleep. I'm waiting for the day when I can click a button on my phone to go to sleep instantly and wake up instantly on a timer. No natural feeling of sleepiness. I hate the time lost to sleep. What does it matter if I lose 5 years in my old age? I gain so much time in my younger years. It's like smoking. It's harmful and will kill you in the long term. But why do you care about living to a 100? You will have n other problems.

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

Most of the problems being discussed here in this thread regarding work hours per week, commute times, finding time for leisure and exercise and family time, the time spent dropping off kids at school, etc -- there are mostly unique to America. Americans could really learn a lot about how successful you can be despite spending less time at work, as well as less time fretting about other things, by looking at any of many countries on the continent of Europe, who offer a much better work/life balance but with no sacrifice on work output.

Some of the most talented and productive developers I know are in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and have a lifestyle that would be considered impossible by many in the States.

The brain needs time to recharge, time away from "work", time to think about work without actually doing work, and the punch that gets packed into a shorter work day can be much greater if the brain is working at optimum capacity, which usually doesn't happen if it is taxed for loads of hours day after day after day.

For me personally, my best ideas come when I am away from a computer, and my brain is free to wander. The more time I sit at a computer, ironically the less likely good ideas will come. Most work environments in the States have not learned this yet.

palpatine_an• 9 years ago

Considered impossible due to the different laws set by companies for their employees. European employees get way more vacation time among other things, and American employees get a whole lot of pressure due to the fact that they can be fired anytime with no warning or explanation while places in Europe, for example Denmark, make it much harder to fire employees on a whim, which inherently puts a whole lot pressure on the American employee

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

Everything you said is exactly the point I am making.

tbihl2• 9 years ago

I recognize the thrust of this argument, and anecdotally agree with it from my experience,but it's not practical advice. Work 12 hours, spend at least 30 minutes each way commuting,work out, prepare and eat meals, and you're at pretty nearly 15 hours, without counting preparing for work. Sure,you have time for sleeping 8 hours,but only if you eschew any personal life and find your work sufficiently exciting to not see any need for recreation/fun all week. Dropping to about 6.5 hours of sleep at least doubles time for those things each work day.

I've tried maintaining 8 hours of sleep daily in such conditions. What I've found is that I'm productive for two days. By Tuesday or Wednesday night, I'm frustrated and bored, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing something interesting and, bam, week derailed. For me, 6.5 hours is the compromise that works. Plus, I sleep 9 hours on Friday and Saturday nights.

gejjaxxita2• 9 years ago

How and why would you work for 12 hours in a day? I don't understand why anyone with choose that life for an extended period of time.

tbihl2• 9 years ago

Great co-workers, somewhat interesting work, insight into a really interesting organization, and a situation where I went in with too little information and now would face substantial costs if I back out rather than persisting for another 3 or 4 years.

garfieldnate• 9 years ago

This is the first time I've ever read about sleep problems caused by a simple glass of wine before bed. About ten years ago some study came out linking red wine to heart health, and I remember one smug kid at school making fun of the Mormons because the article had just "proven their religion wrong". Meanwhile health organizations were recommending you not start drinking because it's also addictive. I've heard that the drinking culture in the US has changed lately, as it is being seen as less and less healthy (I've been abroad for about 5 years).

ramblerman• 9 years ago

"Don’t sleep any more than you have to, I usually sleep about four hours per night." -- Think Like a Billionaire, President Trump.

Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

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